Afterlife
by Storm Seller
Summary: There's no such thing as life after death - or is there?
1. Chapter 1

**AFTERLIFE**

Author: Storm

Rating: R

Characters: House, Wilson, Cuddy, Stacy, Rachel, Foreman, Chase, Cameron, Hadley, Taub, Adams, Park.

Disclaimer: Everything belongs to Greg House. Including his creators. And theirs.

Summary: There's no such thing as life after death – or is there?

* * *

**One:**

On the anniversary of House's death, Stacy found herself staring, as she always did, at his picture. Motorcycle helmet in hand, he straddled his garish Repsol, cane tucked into a clip on the side, jeans tight on his long legs, greying hair wind-tousled and a shit-eating grin plastered across his scruffily handsome face. Alive. Amused. Inspired. _Sweet Jesus_. Tears burned the backs of her retinas. She _missed_ him.

She widened her eyelids and studied the picture until she could almost taste the gasoline tang of the exhaust fumes, smell the burning oil and the heady unique combination of stale sweat, fresh air and filched hospital shampoo. She licked her lips and some vestige of sense memory spawned the taste of peppermint, bourbon, Doritos and Vicodin on his breath. A tear skidded down her cheek. Its skittering path stirred the skin-memory of his guitar-calloused hand cupping her jaw, his thumb pilfering her grief, nearly raising a smile. Her palm tingled with the sensation of being pressed to that lean, hard, torso; her back bowed at the comfortable recollection of being cinched into a strong, surprisingly gentle, embrace. Her body ached with love and loss, laced with guilt that she could still care so deeply, so much, about this man who had never been, would and could never be, the one she had married.

When the phone rang, she was so immersed in her reverie she half-expected to hear his gruff, irreverent voice on the other end of the line.

"Stacy?"

The tear-choked whisper jerked her back to the present, made her blink away her own selfish sorrow and squash the secret hope that would not, quite, join House in his deep and peaceful grave.

"_Lisa?_"

It would not have been the first time they had cried, said their goodbyes, and reminisced together. But the raw acuteness of Cuddy's wretchedness forewarned her that this was not about the man who had once been, to each of them, a lover, friend, colleague, and pain in the ass. A frisson of alarm scurried through her, sidelining the almost palpable presence of House.

"What's happened?"

"It's Rachel." Cuddy's voice quaked. "Stacy… Oh God, Stacy, she's dying."

Rachel Cuddy. Nine years old. Purple streaks in her hair from a home-dyeing project with a supposedly saintly best friend. Wickedly devious dark eyes. Too smart for her own good. And with an obsessive fondness for all things pirate. Cuddy hadn't wanted her to suffer through the funeral; but she'd held her tightly at House's graveside, while Rachel sobbed and shouted and hung a much-loved, very battered, eye-patch and a stuffed technicolour parrot from the tombstone.

Suddenly, Stacy could feel House at her elbow, a haunting so intense that the hairs on his arms seemed to scuff against hers and the anxious beat of his heart joined hers as it slammed in her chest.

"_What?_" Her knees caved and she stumbled back, sagged against the edge of the heavy oak desk in her office, felt for a corner and gripped it with a shaking hand. "Why? Where are you?"

"Princeton Plainsboro." Cuddy sniffed fiercely, her attempt at composure fracturing. "I've been through five hospitals. Ten different doctors. Seven different specialists. Three diagnosticians. I came here because…Chase is my last hope. Chase – and Foreman. Everyone's _here_, Stacy. Cameron. Hadley. Adams. Park. Taub. House's prodigies. They all came. For her. For me. But they're not helping. She's still dying." She inhaled loudly, blew the breath out again. "I need to sue them."

Stacy choked back an astonished exclamation.

"Lisa…" She caught herself glancing sidelong, her memory conjuring the phantom of a smile across the lips of her invisible dead ex-boyfriend. _What? What did he – she – know that she hadn't got her head around yet?_ "I'm not sure—"

Before she could wrest the crowd of questions jostling in her throat into some kind of order, Cuddy rushed on.

"Since House died, things have been more…careful. I don't know why it is that his team seem to need to be sticking one finger up at the law and logic and life itself, but they do. Help me light a—" She flinched audibly at her own metaphor, remembering the blaze in the warehouse, and truncated it. "Ceilings caving in. Pranks. Litigation. Those are the odds this team have always thrived on. If I have to take them to court, get them fired, get them locked up, I don't care. I'll do anything. Whatever it takes. Help me, Stacy. _Help_ me."

It was mad. Off the wall. Barking bonkers. She could feel her mind racing all the same. A malpractice suit. She'd need details, of course, but there would be a way. Making them dice with, well, death. Force them to prove themselves. Would it save Rachel? Wouldn't it be worth a try?

"_Please_." Cuddy knew them all as well, if not better, than she did. There was a shred of sanity somewhere in all this. "Please help me." She drew another trembling breath and Stacy could hear her teeth chattering as she sought to clench her jaw, to stave off her mounting panic in search of a solution. "Please. Anything you can do – a Hail Mary – shot in the dark – I don't care! Chase is as close as I'm ever going to get to having House here. And I need House."

Stacy's eyes tracked to the picture, shifted right to the goofily grinning man on the Harley beside House.

"Have you tried calling Wilson?"

Cuddy drew a ragged breath. The phone creaked as if she were hunching her shoulders, hugging herself in one of her old hospital's bright, colourful, children's ward corridors, looking down towards the oncology wing.

"The last time I saw him was at the funeral. He had five months to live. That was five years ago. There're no numbers for him any more. I've tried."

Stacy found her feet. Walking as if on water, she was drawn to the picture. She traced the chevrons on the leather jackets of the men in the photo. That sneaky hope shimmered again, glinting like a visual spill of reckless laughter on the frame's glass.

"Alright," she agreed, almost breathless with the realisation of what she was about to risk. "Alright. I'll clear my schedule and come straight down."

"_Thank you_." Heartfelt, that. She sounded stronger for her tiny success. It had to be killing her, that all her knowledge, all her love, was rendered so useless by this mystery disease. A tissue rustled as Cuddy blew her nose. "When?"

"Tomorrow, at the latest," Stacy promised. "I'll be with you by the afternoon." She hesitated for a final moment; then unhooked the picture from the wall and stared down at it, wondering. House's presence at her elbow seemed to have vanished. "Lisa—"

"Yes?"

"I might know someone who can help. If I make a call…?"

"You can call the Queen of England if you think she can do any good." Cuddy choked on a damp, feeble, chuckle. "Anyone you can think of. Anything you can do. Even if it's just…"

…_to tell me _I_ did everything I could._

"I'm coming," Stacy interjected, shutting down that unthinkable, probable, vision of events as if that might somehow keep it from happening.

"Thank you," Cuddy repeated, breath shuddering as if she could shuck off the concept of a tiny coffin herself. "Until tomorrow."

"I'll be there by four."

The line closed and Stacy was left in the humming static with the cold picture growing warm in her hands.

Distractedly, she set the phone aside on the bookcase, and made her way back to her desk, checking to see that her door was closed before she sat. Then, very slowly, she turned the frame over and undid the catches that held the back to the glass. The picture remained in place, neatly tacked to the backing paper. But, tucked between the glossed black sheet and the wooden back, was an envelope, stamped and addressed to her. The postmark was illegible, only the date discernable. She traced it with one lacquered nail. It had been mailed six months after the funeral.

There was no note, nothing to indicate that it was anything more than a last will and whim on the part of a man who knew she would grieve for a lifetime. Nothing, except the certainty that he had known she was every bit as suspicious, clever, and conniving as he was. Setting the envelope aside, she lifted the backing paper and, slowly, carefully, untucked the picture from the sticky corners that held it in place. With one last look at the grinning friends sealed in celluloid, safe from jail, cancer, fire, and worms, she turned the image over. Printed on the back in House's spidery, familiar hand, was a row of numbers.

Stacy fished sightlessly in her desk drawer for her cell phone. Taking a deep breath, she flipped it open and started to dial.

TBC…


	2. Chapter 2

**Two:**

The phone rang a half dozen times before it connected. A clatter, a curse, and a series of thumps greeted her, as if the handset had been fumbled and dropped.

"Hello?"

"Hi!"

The voice on the other end was chipper and unfamiliar. Stacy frowned at the numbers on the photograph, wondered if she'd misdialled.

"Hello," she repeated uncertainly. "I'm looking for…"

Who _was_ she looking for, exactly? She set the picture on her desk and rubbed her forehead, the skin bunching between her brows. This was absurd. Lunatic. It gave chasing ghosts a whole new literalness. She tried again. She was out on this limb anyway.

"I'm Stacy Warner."

"Uh huh?" There was no recognition. No indication that this stranger knew who she was or why she might be calling. Then, all of a sudden, he fell over himself. "Oh! Oops. Sorry. My bad. This is Lucas Douglas. P.I."

A private investigator. Well, that made sense. Of a sort. _This_ private investigator? Hapless. Disengaged. Disorganised. And, by the sounds of things, asleep in the middle of the day.

"How can I help you?"

She honestly wasn't sure that he could. Tentatively, she decided to give him a chance.

"I…um…do you investigate missing persons cases?"

"Do I…? Yeah! Yeah. No problem!"

He sounded like a kid on caffeine pills. What was this? Some posthumous prank on House's part? Nothing about this contact was convincing her that he could find his own head without a map and both hands. How was he supposed to help her find a dead man? _Drive to Princeton. Turn right inside the cemetery. First left after the broken-winged angel statue…_ This was ludicrous.

"Never mind." Losing faith abruptly, Stacy shook her head and apologised: "I'm sorry to have troubled you."

Embarrassed, surprised, and more disappointed than she had any logical right to be, she snapped the cell closed and dropped it onto the table.

No sooner had she done so than it rang.

"Hello?"

It was the P.I. again. His bright, boyish voice held a perspicacious note that hadn't been there before.

"Sorry. You said _Stacy_, right?"

* * *

He met her in a café a few blocks away from the firm. A few inches shy of six feet, with two-day-old dark stubble, bed-head and a grubby white t-shirt that had clearly been slept in, it was only belatedly that she recognised him as Lisa's one-time fiancé. But in spite of his shambolic appearance, his blue eyes were sharply astute.

"This is nice," he announced, as he ordered her a coffee at the counter. "Covert. Should I have brought my cloak and dagger?"

"I beg your pardon?"

What _had_ Lisa seen in him?

He tossed her an oddly sympathetic look.

"This isn't where you take your clients."

"No…" How had he known that? "You're not a client."

"Yet." This time the look was twinkling, all mischief and meddlesomeness. Espirit de House. _Okay, Lisa,_ now _I get it._ "Depends on who you want me to find. I never know what I'm getting into. I might need a lawyer."

So might she, if this half-baked hope of hers turned out to have a reason.

"If I get you into a mess, I'll get you out of it," she assured him firmly.

Where had _that_ saviour complex come from? She half-glanced around as Lucas led the way to a corner table, appropriately flanked by a jungle of plastic plants. Was Wilson haunting her as well?

As if on cue, his sceptical frown flashed across her mind's eye. Firmly, she took a hold of herself. She was not being haunted and – if she were right about that for the right reason – she was not more than mildly crazy to be doing this.

"So, who're you looking for?" Lucas dropped down into one side of the red plastic booth, plunked his mug on the table and stirred four packets of sugar into his frothy cappuccino. He sipped, slurped, grimaced and added two more. "Husband run off with another woman? Another man? Illegitimate love child out there somewhere?"

She appraised the sparkle in his eyes, knew he was teasing her. Did he know why he was here? Know more than that she was a friend of Lisa's, that was? God, was the whole world in on this secret or joke or whatever it was and she the only one still searching for the punch line? She took her coffee black but she stirred it all the same, trying to soothe her rampant thoughts out of the paranoid tangle they were in.

"I'm looking for an old friend," she said finally. "Friends, actually."

Lucas slurped again, cocked his bushy brows at her. "You know, there are websites for that now—"

She raised a hand to cut him off, opened her oversized black leather purse and drew out a copy of the photo she'd made. She passed it across to him. He unfolded it one handed and studied it without reaction.

"You know them," Stacy pressed, scanning his quirkily expressionless face for some hint as to what he was thinking. "Doctors Gregory House and James Wilson. I don't even know if they're still alive..."

Lucas took his turn to interrupt.

"Greg House died five years ago in a warehouse fire. You know that. You were at his funeral. I saw you there." His attention ticked from one man to the other. "James Wilson died three and a half months later, in Las Vegas, from complications arising from a prior radical chemotherapy attempt to treat a stage two thyoma. There was no funeral and no official obituary. His family were notified. He donated his body to science."

Stacy's gut caved in on itself as though she'd been kicked. Her tiny little hopeless hope shrivelled and shrank.

Lucas gulped down the last of his saccharine coffee and stood up, tucking the photo into his pocket.

"I'll see what I can do."

"What?" she blinked at him, confounded.

"Here." He rooted around in both jacket pockets and all four of the ones in his jeans before he located and extracted a business card. He handed it over, back first. Small print detailed eye-watering rates. She nodded her agreement and he winked. "Then I'll be in touch. Hasta la vista, senorita!"

His Spanish accent was appalling.

"Wait." Slinging some change down to cover the tip, Stacy abandoned her untouched coffee and hastened after him out onto the sidewalk. "Mr Douglas – what exactly are you going to do?" She had a sudden, horrible, vision of him digging around in the moonlight in an unmarked grave. "I'm not in the black-market for…souvenirs."

He grinned at her, squinting in the brilliant summer sunlight that streamed in under the café's red and white striped canopy.

"I was thinking more along the lines of a Ouija board. Though I can probably raise to a white goat sacrifice, a robe, maybe some chanting…"

"You're not as funny as you think you are."

His smile broadened, tilted craftily at the corners.

"I've been told that," he admitted; then, weighting his words carefully: "But I'm definitely _not boring._"

That – a pure Houseism if ever there was one – made her let him go. Watching him stroll away to a beat-up blue Volkswagen van that looked more fit for a gap year student's 'round the States expedition than a P.I's base of operations, she wondered if she should have told him that there was a clock ticking. But she had the feeling he already knew.

TBC...


	3. Chapter 3

**Three:**

An overnight case thrown together, her tan leather briefcase so full of malpractice case law it was straining at the straps and bulging open at the zipper, Stacy arrived in Princeton a little after three. She checked in at her hotel and shed the sweat-damped cream silk shirt that she had worn for the morning. In her bra, crumpled navy skirt and hose, she deposited her bag on the bed and padded over to the bathroom to switch on the shower. She locked the door into the tiled white chamber and stripped out of the rest of her clammy clothes in relief. Between the muggy, stifling summer heat, a hustled morning reassigning or postponing her cases and cancelling the hiking trip she and Mark had planned for the weekend, and the two hour drive down with her air-con on the fritz, she was hot, sticky and too flustered to be of any use to Cuddy or to Rachel.

She tossed her clothes into the dry-clean-only hamper for the laundry service to collect and shed most of her jewellery: her mother's silver crucifix necklace, her own sturdy black diver's watch and, with some difficulty as her knuckles had swollen in the heat, the heavy white-gold, blue sapphire and mother of pearl ring House had bought her as an apology for forgetting their third anniversary. Finally, clad in only her wedding ring, she checked her phone and set it on the cistern of the toilet beside the walk-in shower. Lucas hadn't got back to her yet, but she had the feeling he was the sort of man with the timing to call at exactly the most inconvenient moment. Jittery with uncertainty and anticipation as to what – or who – he thought he could find, she couldn't face missing him when he did.

Stepping under the delightfully cool water, she closed her eyes and breathed out for what felt like the first time in hours. The downpour swept her staticky hair back off her face. Long sleek droplets found the prominence of her cheekbones, traced the planes of her face like fingers. She smiled into the soothing tease of the sensation as they stroked down her spine and slipped over her breasts. Her thoughts conjured House again and, inevitably, the restless tide inside her swirled southwards and eddied there.

Her lips parted as her breath caught. But instead of the clean freshness of the water, she could taste him again: the bittersweet, foggy, slickness of shared cigarettes and peppermints, the rough-soft, smarting, prickle of his unshaven jaw and ever-questing lips. She could smell the sharp antiseptic of hospital cleaning products, the ruddy condensation-tang of sweat from a late game of racquetball with Wilson, and the muskiness of his brewing arousal for her. Feel the heat and the weight of him, pressing her back against the wet tiles with a bump to her spine and the careful catch of his hands in her hair, cradling her head, pulling her face toward him.

Her body arched of its own volition and she let her hands glide down from her liquid hair to her nape, follow his favourite path across her shoulders and down, thumbs swooping over the fullness of her breasts, palms fitted to her ribs, snaking to her hips. Her fingers crept inwards, teasing through the dark vee of soft curls at her pubis… Abruptly, lack of time, and loyalty to Mark, made her pull back. Much as she needed to take the edge off, she could no more afford to lose herself in a familiar fantasy right now than to crack out the wine and get blindingly drunk. The House in her head vehemently disagreed.

Finishing her ablations hastily, she shut off the shower, hung her head upside down to blast her hair dry and gave it a quick once over with a set of straighteners. Clean and refreshed, if still decidedly ansty, she applied a light covering of make-up and found herself a colour-block cotton dress from her bag. The top was a loose black vest-fit, the skirt a Tetris pattern of black, white and forest green. It was smart enough, if she threw a short-sleeved jacket over it, to be professional; but it was also comfortable enough to hug a friend, curl up on a bed and cosset a sick little girl. Skipping the hose in deference to the weather, she stepped into a pair of low-heeled, peep-toed, sling-backs, grabbed her briefcase, phone and car keys, and headed out once more.

* * *

The hospital hadn't changed a great deal since her last visit, nearly a decade ago. As she strode through the automatic doors, Stacy took in the same broad lobby and wide staircases, the multicultural mural painted above the reception desk, the same nurses working their shifts, the ever-changing flocks of students trailing after their tutors. The set-up was so similar to how it had been that she was almost sure she would see Cuddy in her favourite scarlet power suit pacing behind the glass doors of the Dean's office, haranguing insurance companies, board members, and the CDC via three separate conference calls running simultaneously. Wilson, white-coat and stethoscope in place, would be busy in the free Clinic, taking the time to read patient histories, to smile and reassure, no matter how good, bad, boring, or idiotic the news he had to deliver. House would be there too, jeans-clad, in a tatty black rock band emblazoned t-shirt, a half-inched cherry lollipop stuck in his mouth as he skulked by the pharmacy, cutting consults like a kid cut classes, impatient to return to his speciality: watching a soap, a porno or reading up on a convoluted new medical technique, until some curious case to pique his interest and expertise could be found.

When she looked for them, of course, none of them were there. The Dean's office was locked and dark, only Foreman's brother was visible in the adjoining office, fixing a glitch on one of the computer systems. A plump Asian doctor that Stacy didn't recognise and a bored redheaded Ophthalmologist she thought she knew from his fellowship years were at work in the Clinic. It didn't shake her exactly; at least not half so much as if the ones she wanted to see had actually been standing in front of her. But the call she had made to Lucas had stripped the resignation off her sad acceptance of each of their departures and reopened the raw surreality that had been there before. It would never feel right to be here without them or to know that, according to all the laws of science and nature, neither House nor Wilson could ever come back. It felt even worse know that Cuddy _was_ here - and that Rachel might never get to leave. With a shiver, she did her best to banish that thought and hurried over to the elevator.

* * *

She stepped out onto the corner where the Oncology and Diagnostic wings adjoined. On one wall, several Hall-of-Fame style arrangements had been added in place of the abstract watercolours that had hung there before. There was an inspirational collage: a medley of snapshots of kids and adults who had survived their cancers and rare illness, captured in various poses of relief and gladness. Beside it, arranged formally in organised rows, were photos of the doctors who worked on this floor.

In spite of the regimented layout, the photographer or photographers had tried to freeze-frame something of the individuals' personalities as well as their professionalism. A quick glance found Wilson's picture amidst a row of the department heads, past and present. He was at his desk, surrounded by stacks of colour-coded files, his white coat hung on a peg behind him, and the sleeves of his lemon shirt folded back to mid-forearm. He had an x-ray held up to the light in one hand, but his attention had been pulled away from it by the photographer and he'd glanced across to the doorway, a stray sheaf of bright brown hair tipped over his forehead, and his lips quirked in a half-surprised, half-genuine smile. To one who knew him, the slight disarray to his customarily neat and stylish hair and the depth of the lines around his eyes put the photo at only weeks before his departure, maybe days before House's death. It could even have been his own x-ray he was holding. A wizard wheeze of Foreman's this, then, before anyone had broken the grim news.

Beneath the picture were two rows of dates, marking the years of Wilson's appointment and the forty-four years of his life. Stacy's trachea tried to tie itself in a knot and she swallowed painfully. What she wouldn't give to have him push back his chair and step out of the image to join her, offer his steady, sensible, support and put a warm hand on her shoulder to walk down the corridor and turn for the children's ward together, gathering up Greg on the way…

Speaking of, she scanned the photographs again and found his. He'd been snapped at his whiteboard, frowning at his own illegible scribbling, lacrosse ball in one hand, black marker in the other, ink on his teeth from tapping the pen against them, and his cane hooked over his elbow. The picture was crooked, as if he'd spun on his heel when he heard the click and pitched the ball, knocked the photographer for six. He probably had. She tried to straighten it anyway, gave up and stroked one finger down the creased sleeve of his blue shirt until the picture ended and she was left touching the life and death lines beneath his image too. _Oh God, Greg._ She tugged her phone out of her pocket and checked it fruitlessly. _We need you._ I _need you._ _Please let me be right about this. Please let the last five years have been some hideous, necessary, hoax._ _Please—_

—_stop doing this to yourself._ Sharply, she curtailed her silent bargaining with her God. If she was wrong, if the photo had been nothing more than a last farewell from him or, worse, some well-meaning gesture from one of Wilson's family tasked with sorting out his effects, then there was no one coming to help her. It was she and Cuddy who had to figure out a way to save Rachel – and she had a lot of work to do. And if, she thought, forcing herself to turn away from the heart-crushing pictures, if by some improbable chance she was right, if House truly had been sending her a message from beyond the "grave," then it wasn't a higher power she needed to get on the right side of. It was man's law, here and now, that was her biggest contender – and she had even more work to do to deal with that.

Rachel had been moved back into a private room that morning, after six days in the paediatrics ICU. Misdirected once, it was ten minutes after four when Stacy hurried down the cheerful yellow children's ward corridor with the alphabet-frieze running along the walls. As she approached room four-fourteen, the glass sliding door scrolled back and a woman stepped out. She was gaunt and pale. A thick swarm of dark curls were scraped back in a greasy topknot and the skirt of her raspberry ponte dress was criss-crossed with creases. She was barefoot, but she wore a crumpled fern-leaf patterned, sky, royal, pink and navy triangular shawl draped around her shoulders, the ends of it clutched to her chest. Goosebumps and upright hairs peppered her lightly freckled arms, as if she couldn't get warm. She scanned the corridor in both directions, but seemingly saw no one.

"Lisa."

Stacy set down her briefcase and jacket at her feet.

The woman double-took, then gasped and hastened towards her.

"Stacy. Thank God."

Stacy opened her arms and Cuddy caved against her, heaving a sigh of relief that seemed to rattle every one of her bones. When had she last eaten? Slept? The shadows under her eyes were as dark as bruises. They parted, slowly, and Stacy kept a supportive grasp on Cuddy's shoulder, half afraid she might collapse she seemed so wrung out and shaken.

"How is she?"

"Holding on." Cuddy's voice was threadbare and exhausted. "Cameron thought she might have PANDAS, uh, Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal infections. She suggested continuous flow centrifugation and plasmapheresis with IVIG six days ago – it's experimental, it's not even supposed to be used to treat autoimmune diseases outside of clinical trials – but…what was I to do?

"She…she developed a pulmonary oedema and her kidneys started shutting down. I thought…I thought…" She drew a quaking breath and dragged a hand down her face, as if she could wipe the images of her dying child from behind her eyes. "It didn't work, Stacy. She's…she's still alive, but—"

"Shh. Shh," Stacy soothed, palm smoothing up and down Cuddy's upper arm, rumpling the shawl. "Start from the beginning. Tell me everything."

"Yes…yes, I must." Cuddy nodded in a disorientated fashion, before seeming to remember that Stacy had spent the last eight months in a state of blissful ignorance. She passed her hand through her hair, snagging a knot of curls free, and nodded again, somehow summoning the strength to pull herself together. "Yes, okay. Just let me get someone to sit with her for a little while."

"Of course."

Moving nearer to the door, Stacy peered trepidatiously through the glass as Cuddy returned to the huge orthopaedic bed that dominated the room and perched on the edge of the mattress, leaning over to cuddle the hump of blankets almost lost in the centre. Stroking a few visible locks of stripy pink, dark brown and purple hair with one hand, she used the other to hook the bedside phone and cup it to her ear, talking softly to her daughter while she dialled. She exchanged a few words with someone on the other end of the line and then hung up, standing to do a last check of the small factory's worth of machines that were clustered around the bed. As she did so, Stacy caught sight of Rachel for the first time.

"Oh my God."

The words tumbled off her tongue, unbidden. Unconsciously, she raised a hand to cover her mouth. The wraith huddled in the bed would have been unrecognisable as her friend's mischievous, spirited, little daughter, were it not for one single thing.

The shirt had plainly been bought for a child of three or four. It had once been red, faded to a patchy pink from repeated washing. A cartoon pirate adorned the front, the design peeling and tattered. Knowing Lisa had hated it when Rachel had learned to curse like Bluebeard, it was a safe bet that the shirt had been bought by House some six years ago, when he and Cuddy were still dating. Stacy couldn't take her eyes off it.

When she did, she wished she hadn't. The shirt had been bought for a younger girl, yes, but it wasn't even snug on Rachel's frame. A few inches too short at the hem, it sat high enough to expose the girl's concave stomach. Her hipbones stood up like bony Alps. The puddled blue hospital-issue blankets concealed her legs, but her arms were little more than skin shrink-wrapped around bone. Above the threadbare round-necked collar of her shirt, her clavicle stuck out starkly, flesh cavernously sunken on either side. Her neck was stripped down to spine and tendons. Her once pretty, impish face was a grey, papery skull.

A misty oxygen mask obscured most of her features, the solid plastic dome seeming too heavy for her fragile frame. Coloured wires twisted around her in a tangled web, threading in and out of the arm and neck holes of her shirt. Her left hand was swollen. Three fat IV tubes protruded from under a huge, crinkly plaster that stuck most of her fingers together. Rainbow lines and numbers on phosphorant screens showed that, in spite of the plethora of boluses pouring nutrition and medications into her, her vitals were barely holding at the bottom of the safety range.

"Excuse me."

A tall, willowy young woman in black drainpipe jeans, ankle boots and a yellow t-shirt with Thevada Yuan Kang Chang printed on it, an elegant Asian woman and a pale blue elephant amidst the unmistakable twining vines and flowers of Thailand, came up to Stacy's side. In spite of her informal appearance, she had a green-tubed stethoscope looped around her neck and the quiet confidence of a doctor. But, as she touched the door to push it open, the fingers of her right hand spasmed and her shoulder twitched. Even as she apologised and stepped aside, Stacy realised who she was and what the symptom meant. Remy Hadley. Huntington's disease. She couldn't be much more than thirty-seven years old.

"Thank you, Thirteen." Stooping to kiss her daughter's pallid forehead in farewell, Cuddy picked up a book that she'd left open on the bed and handed it to the young woman. "We were reading _The Adventures of the New Cut Gang._ We got to page thirty-three. I think maybe she'd like it if you—"

"Of course," Thirteen said quickly. "You go. I'll call you if _anything_ changes."

Pressing her eyes shut, as if against another deluge of horrid imaginings, Cuddy nodded. Then, with a last lingering look at her ailing daughter, she rejoined Stacy in the corridor.

TBC…


	4. Chapter 4

**Four:**

Lucas didn't want to be sat on a plane. He'd spent the last six weeks elbow deep in a church's charity box theft case. In the final days, he'd figured out that one of the volunteer parishioners wasn't just fiddling the books; he'd been fiddling with the altar boys too. What Lucas _wanted, _after that, was to be at home, with the radio on full blast, in a hot bath full of fluffy bubbles, with his beer hat on. He _wanted_ to sing loudly and out of tune and to glug a microbrew through a twirly straw until he forgot about it. But, as an old friend of his once told him, the universe didn't give a damn about what he wanted.

It just figured that it was that same old friend who was currently helping the universe to screw him over.

"You're an ass, _pal_," he told the shameless biker in the photograph Stacy had given him, as he slumped down in the plane's bucket seat while it shot up from the runway and began the steady hike to thirty-six thousand feet. "Even dead, you're an ass."

The orange-skinned, bottle-blonde, matron in the seat beside him eyed him sideways, straining to contort her botoxed features into disapproving frown.

"He is," Lucas defended himself, and put the picture away before she could get a good look at it.

By rights, he thought, tilting his head back and focusing aimlessly on the little overhead reading light controls as the sky rushed past the window in a diagonal blur, he should hate the man at lot more than he did. House had hired him, fired him, hung out with him, dropped him when Wilson got over the pissy fit that had made him stop returning House's calls, helped him hook up with his fiancée, and nabbed her off him a few months before the wedding.

But Lucas didn't hold grudges. People were people: erratic, selfish, altruistic, and unpredictable. Either a man kept them in separate compartments – customers, friends, and everything else – or he shut up and sucked up the consequences. And the consequences had _sucked._ But then there had been the post-mortem present – House's favourite, breath-takingly gorgeous, acoustic guitar – and, since it had been mailed to his doorstep a week after House's death, along with a signed copy of The Clash's cover of _I Fought the Law (And the Law Won)_, one of the most spine-tinglingly tantalising puzzles Lucas had come across in a lifetime's worth of obsession with them. Shallow, to forgive a man all his faults for a shiny object and a catch-me-if-you-can taunt? Yeah. But Lucas was okay with that. Shallow, schmallow. He was _interested._

He'd had his doubts about House's demise from the start. He could play credulous, and had, when Lisa had called him, voice hoarse with shock. But his first reaction hadn't been astonishment, disbelief or even grief. He'd wanted to snicker and to call the bluff. A lonely OD on Vicodin or morphine in his apartment, sure, _au revoir, House, good to have known you, man_. But an OD of horse with a drug-addicted patient in a burning building? It was a little too dramatic – and a lot too social – to be believed.

It had been convenient too. Okay, screwing up a prank and winding up with another six-month stint in jail while his best, maybe only, friend spent five months dying of cancer, that was a pretty good reason for a guy to top himself. But in a _fire?_ One of the surest ways to tie a corpse into a crispy balloon animal and twist the post-mortem evidence and identification procedures six ways to hell and back? _Right_ before an arrest warrant was issued? Uh huh. Give the other one a good pull. It's got bells on.

He'd kept his mouth shut, of course. At the time, he hadn't had much more than gut suspicion to go on and it was _funeral_, for God's sake. Black suits, black streaks of eyeliner on cheeks, black moods, and a big black urn in the middle of it. But there had been one too many oddities in the midst of all the mourning for Lucas to buy into it as a bad goodbye.

The first had been Wilson, wretched and ranting, saying what they were all thinking, with angry, hurt, desperate, tears in his eyes. It hadn't been his speech so much – a heartfelt love you, hate you, fuck you for doing this to me disaster – or that his phone went off halfway through – a text from the hospital, he'd said – or even that he bailed mid-sentence, apparently breaking down beyond the point at which he could pull it back together. It had been that it wasn't a text from the hospital at all. Or, for that matter, his cell phone.

Lucas had swiped it from the plinth, where Wilson had abandoned it when he bolted out of the ceremony. He'd stepped up to cover the ghastly pause, told a few stories that summed up House's ass-hattery and turned it back into a good thing. They all knew House was a bastard. Whether _he_ knew it or not, they'd loved him anyway. _Because_ of it, sometimes. When he'd got things back on track, Lucas had slipped to the shadows, checked the cell's still glowing screen.

_Shut up, you idiot!_

It could've been from Stacy, Cuddy, Foreman or even Blythe. A fond but firm reproach for a little too much honesty. As House would've observed: people don't speak ill of the dead; funerals are a big fun festival of lies. Or half-truths. Or whatever. But Lucas had been sat close enough to hear Wilson's surprised mutter as he found the phone in his pocket: _This isn't mine._

It wasn't, as it turned out. And maybe Stacy, Cuddy, Foreman or even Blythe knew him well enough to have figured he might lose it mid-speech and start cussing out House's brisket to have salvaged his phone from the front desk where everyone had left theirs and snuck it into his back pocket en route to the pews. But no way, no how, would any of them have planned far enough ahead to purchase, with cash, a burner phone, from one of the few shops in town with no CCTV inside or within a block of the store. Or, according to the guy at the store, to have bought it while wearing a brilliant orange and green Hawaiian with coconuts on it, a giant SLR around the neck, a stupid blue I heart Princeton baseball hat, riding in a wheelchair, and putting on a British accent.

With no one paying him to investigate a case, Lucas had held off flashing his ID around to find out more. He had no interest in stirring up a storm without a better reason than his own curiosity. But he'd turned over a Stones' album late that night, thought hard about what he knew and where he might subtly unearth a little more information.

His second stop had been Foreman. A few days after the funeral, Lucas had dropped by to speak to him and caught the Dean in a pensive daze. He'd been speaking to the man's brother, checking he wouldn't be interrupting to go in, while Foreman idly paced his office pouring over a folder. As Lucas watched, he'd sat down in one of the chairs that formed two conversational crescents adjacent to the big picture windows and set the folder down on a table. The thing had wobbled furiously. Big deal, right? Who cared about a wonky table? Except that Foreman was the kind of guy who'd spend an hour fussing around with bits of folded up paper while he waited for maintenance to come and do an emergency fix. And he'd nearly jumped out of his skin when the folder spasmed, reaching down not to catch it but to snatch something out from under the table leg.

He'd picked it up and stared at it, as if he'd seen a ghost, then laughed and sat back, eyes unfocusing thoughtfully. Marcus had waved Lucas in then and Foreman had hurriedly slid the little piece of plastic back under the table leg. It had taken Lucas a few minutes to subtly get a good look at it. But when he did there was no mistaking it. The piece of plastic ineffectively stabilising the table was House's hospital ID tag.

Lucas hadn't asked why it was there – or why it had made Foreman snicker and the squared, stoic set of his shoulders unclench a little. The Dean would never have told him. But he'd made another little mental note in the neurological jotter he'd opened and, after the preliminary enquiries about how each other was bearing up, turned the conversation to his pretext for being there.

He'd come armed with a ruse about an unpaid bill, figuring he could always segue into some tripe about needing a good grief counsellor or hug and hand-holding group to get Foreman to talk about his former boss a little. But after the tag episode, he hadn't needed to and he'd simply rattled off the bill spiel to cover his tracks. The best lies, as House would've slyly reminded him, were half true. After all, though he'd written the money off years ago, the bill – dating back to House hiring him to help hassle Wilson – hadn't ever been paid.

Unexpectedly, though, it had provided him with another clue. There had been a cheque waiting for him – signed by Wilson and, according to a note on the back, sans the amount it had cost to replace the flatscreen and bath-tub safety rail after a prank war he'd got into with House had got out of hand. Even so, it had been more than double what he was owed. There'd been no explanation. Only a note that read: _Thank you –_ _for helping him bring me Home._ A bad pun? he'd wondered, eyeing it thoughtfully in the middle of Foreman's office. A belated thank-you for the last few years? Wilson was dying, after all. But he'd caught Foreman watching him with the same wary curiosity he'd felt himself as he watched the Dean through the glass doors and hurriedly took his leave. It was still only a gut feeling; but he was pretty sure there was a third option here. After all, Wilson had been full-throttle in the stage of anger during the funeral – and he didn't seem likely to have been in a better mood having to spend his last few weeks before he quit Princeton to go live out his bucket list helping Blythe go through House's effects as well as his own.

It had been Blythe, though, who had got Lucas really digging around in the details of House's death. They'd got to chatting at the funeral, after Wilson had fled. He'd found her standing out in the cemetery, staring rather sadly at the place his car had been parked and an empty motorbike bay beside it, and overheard her murmur to herself that she'd better get used to having neither of them. Lucas had smiled at her, empathising with this self-controlled, upright, lonely woman, whose love and motherliness had shone like a beacon in the sea of funereal blackness.

He'd caught glimpses of it before: in the white-knuckled grip Wilson had developed when he hugged her outside before the ceremony, buried his face in her shoulder and choked for a moment on his fragile composure; in the raw ache in her voice as she told them all that Greg had been a _good_son, whatever his faults; in the way she'd cradled his urn in both hands and kissed the face of it farewell, as if it were the little boy she'd birthed fifty-three years ago.

He'd been lonely too, Lucas guessed, and in need of a hug himself. She'd given him one and, a few days later, he'd found himself sitting in House's kitchen with her, sharing stories like old friends.

They'd kept in touch, after that, sporadically. The odd walk in a park here. A Thanksgiving there. He was someone for her to care for and she was tough, clever, kind and welcoming, all the things his own mother had never been. He talked to his own mom too, of course, went on awkward Christmas visits where he was the centre of her world for a good five minutes before she lost interest and went back to poking around in their ancestry. Family was important, didn't he know? Some years, she didn't even remember to buy him a gift.

But Blythe sent him cards with long stories from House's past – and her own lively escapades as a young adult. And she'd called him, all aflutter and fretting, when the first card came to her six months after House's death and a few months before Christmas. It wasn't Lucas's own to her. That had turned up a few days before and she'd phoned him then to thank him. No. This card had been unsigned. But, he'd supposed, it hadn't really needed a signature. On the front was a picture of a giant, heart-shaped lollipop, bearing the slogan: love sucks. Inside, a familiar hand had scrawled simply: _Dear Mom, the afterlife is boring, the company isn't. Love, XXX._

They'd come each year, after that, all but confirming Lucas's initial suspicions. A man who had committed unplanned suicide had first made sure he'd written up a couple of decades worth of Christmas and birthday cards and arranged them to be posted, year after year, by different people across the US? No way. Nuh uh. Never. It was then that Lucas had understood the tag in Foreman's office. The note with Wilson's cheque. It was a breadcrumb trail. House wasn't dead. He was Sherlock goddamn Holmes.

Left to himself, Lucas would've kept his nose out of it once he'd figured it out. He was a P.I. not a C.I.; he wasn't going to nark. Okay, House was a jerk for making his mom cry. But love, well, love sucked, like the card had said. And it could make a man do some damn fool things. Like drive a car into his ex-girlfriend's house. Or go to jail instead of plea-bargain his way out of it. Or become buddies with his ex-fiancée because he still adored her kid (and her) and, oh wait, that was Lucas himself being a fool… But whatever. He'd've skipped town and jail for Lisa, even now. The brief spell he'd spent working for House had proven to him over and over that there was no one on earth whom he loved as much as Wilson and it wasn't unreciprocated. They'd earned whatever time they had left together.

That was, until Lisa called, scared out of her skin because Rachel was sick. And then Rachel was dying. And Lucas, beyond frightened himself, had started to hunt for the one person he _knew_ could help her. It had taken months to get _anywhere_: there were endless dead end leads, stupid guessing games trying to form codes and messages out of the postmarks from the various towns and cities the cards had come from, phone-calls to hospitals, estate agents, drug mules and forgers, all of which he'd tried to do without tipping anyone else off. But, and maybe the universe did give a crap after all, just as he'd got it narrowed down to a single city Stacy had called, offering him the perfect excuse – and a legal safety net for the sheer havoc he could unleash in digging up a dead man's grave.

If he'd needed another sign, he'd surely got it, not that he ought to have done by then. Still, it was a little weird to go to someone's funeral and stay convinced they were driving around out there somewhere and not on a phantom bike, incorporeal, haunting an otherwhere. With Stacy, though, the chain of connections had been complete: there was the best friend, Wilson; a powerful medic, Foreman; a family member, Blythe, and then a lover who was also a lawyer, Stacy - all the people House had loved and trusted the most, and who could help him if the time ever came to return to life. Each had been left a single clue and, if Lucas wasn't very much mistaken, each was a person House knew that he, Lucas, would know to look to for signs of his life. _Catch me if you can? You're on, buddy._ Lucas had grabbed his proverbial net, stun-gun, and carry cage, otherwise known as his cell, his passport, and his bank cards. He'd met with Stacy, put a call in to his own lawyer, and boarded the very next plane that would take him two-thirds of the way across the country.

* * *

Nearly two thousand miles away, in a private room, a middle-aged man was fighting for every breath. The vast thymic mass in his chest had compressed his surrounding organs. Stoke's collar bulged, heavy and odemous, around his throat, masking the painful jerks of his Adam's apple as he gulped at and gagged on his own saliva. Pemberton's sign had distorted his puffy features, flushing them a dull scarlet. Chemotherapy, a lengthy fight for life, and the ongoing presence of myasthenia gravis, the symptoms of which had first tipped him off to the presence of his tumour, had weakened his muscles all but beyond use. His left eye would not open. His arms were too weak to lift. It was his partner's hand that clutched the oxygen mask to his face for him, knuckles white as he sought to keep his own fingers from shaking. The partner's thin lips moved beneath a week's worth of greying stubble, muttering out a hopeless mantra:

"C'mon, c'mon, you son of a bitch. Don't leave me. Don't leave me alone."

The whimper of machines was constant. The laboured wheeze of the patient's breathing was punctuated by lengthy stops and ragged starts. Several feet back from the partner's long huddle of limbs on the mattress edge and the bloated, jaundiced figure dying between lank white sheets, the oncologist stood monitoring the situation with the grave, hollow-stomached, sense of resignation. There was now very little he could do.

Habitually, nonetheless, he glanced down at the chart tucked in the foot of the bed. Part of the name James W— was just visible behind the sheaf of consent papers that had been signed a few weeks ago for entry into this clinical trial. Conventional therapies had all failed: resection of the malignant mass, six rounds of chemotherapy, radiation, three more rounds of chemo. The mass had reached stage three by the time James had been put forward for the trial. The oncologist had allowed it, even encouraged it; the data would be useful for his study. Logically, he had suspected the outcome would not be a success. Professionally, he had offered the couple the realistic odds. Privately, he understood why they had grasped at the chance, however slight. Dying sucked if you had something, or someone, to live for.

He was of a similar age, the oncologist. Though there was precious little of his patient's swollen features, threadbare skull, and wasted body in which to recognise it, there was a physical similarity between them too. Six feet tall, medium-build, bright brown hair, of the west coast, originally, before winding up here in the mid-west. He'd even been living out his own bucket list, a few years before.

Not that the mirror would show it now. His skin was tanned by the summer sun. Regular sports events kept him trim and fit. James's partner had even jokingly demanded photo id before he'd allow him to administer any treatment. The oncologist had snorted at that. Picture of health he might be, but he knew there were flashes of silver visible at his temples where his shoulder-length hair was knotted back in a ponytail. He was a lucky bastard to still be alive to get them.

Unconsciously, one hand came up to touch the skin around his neat goatee and moustache, checking that his own temperature was within normal ranges, and to skim down to the lean length of his own throat, feeling the burning agony of his patient's every hard won inhale as if he were experiencing it again. He turned his back momentarily to erase the memories of his own struggle from his features. This was James's battle. His – in spite of what he had learned from it, this trial that had evolved from it – was of no help here.

Beyond the glass doors of the private room, a blue overalls-clad janitor was mopping away the invisible lurgies that lurked on the hospital's corridor floor. Briefly, both recognising the sight of impending death, their eyes met through the glass. The oncologist twisted one corner of his mouth down in grim acknowledgement. The janitor held his gaze a beat longer, then, with the resigned shrug of the helpless, carried on mopping.

"I can't be here for this."

The oncologist wheeled back toward the bed as James's partner staggered to his feet. He seized the black wood cane that had been leaning against the dresser and started to stumble toward the door. The patient's eyes were both closed now, the twitches and contortions of his countenance weakening. He was slipping into a coma. Mercifully.

The oncologist stalled James's partner with a firm hand on the shoulder.

"You've been here for the last five years," he reminded him gently. "You can be here for the next five minutes."

The older man struck his hand away, face drawn down to bone and tears blazing in his eyes.

"And the next?" he demanded. "And the next?"

The oncologist, as always, weighed the inevitable decision. There had been no strong religious views expressed, no indications that what he was about to offer might go against either the patient's or his partner's wishes.

"I can make them a little easier."

Blue eyes pierced him to the core. The man's whole posture was spiky with angry desperation, frail with impending loneliness. It took him a long moment to nod as well.

"Yes. Please."

"Okay."

The oncologist moved over to the machines that surrounded James's bedside and, taking a deep breath, opened the cover on the morphine pump controls. He was careful to stand to one side, so that the code he punched in was clearly visible as he gave himself access to elevate the dose pouring into the dying man's veins. A sidelong glance told him that the haggard-faced partner was watching, that his silent suggestion had been noticed, and accepted. If he stayed here, without leaving, there could be a few more wretched days of this: grating in and out of consciousness, every heartbeat hurting, every thread of air sucked in prolonging James's suffering. If he left, it need only be minutes. There wasn't really a choice to make.

He allowed himself only a sad, consolatory smile of sympathy, directed first toward the trembling partner, then towards his oblivious patient. Then, taking a deep breath, almost to remind himself that he could, he stepped out of the room.

* * *

"G-d_damnit_!"

In the relative privacy afforded by the quiet corridor, the oncologist drew back his fist to reproach the wall. He checked himself a split-second from split knuckles and dealt a savage kick to the janitor's nearby bucket instead. Filthy, greyish water splattered up the wall and cascaded across the blue linoleum, undoing an hour's worth of work.

"You can't save them all."

Chin propped on the handle of his mop, both hands loosely coiled around the wooden shaft, the janitor regarded his colleague without rancour.

The oncologist breathed out hard. Unclenching slowly, he leaned back against the bespattered wall, grubby water sluicing the outdoor dust off his black leather loafers.

"I know." He removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose frustratedly. "_I know_."

The janitor was unsympathetic. "Should've stayed working in the free clinic if it's going to get to you this much. You didn't have to go back to your specialty."

"Yeah…" Dark eyes grew pensive, cleared. "No. No, this clinical trial was to good an idea to dismiss."

"The revisitation of the acute febrile process in cases of so-called spontaneous remission and regression was long overdue." The janitor waved a hand vaguely, indicating his opinion of the laxity of the oncology community in general. "Deliberately inducing fever in cancer patients by reworking Coley's Toxin and his experiments in a clinical environment was guaranteed to get funding, whenever you morons caught on. You didn't have to _be_ that moron. You could have left it to someone else."

The oncologist snorted, recognising the baiting tone for what it was.

"I left the use of pyrogenic cytokines for someone else," he retorted. "I _wanted_ to be—" a wry, knowing, glance at his companion "—that moron."

"Then stop _whining._" The janitor scuffed a small wave of the dissipating water toward him with the side of a blue and orange sneaker. "The trial has been producing positive results. But the better results are in the cases where your patients weren't already significantly immunocompromised by recent bouts of chemotherapy—"

"I _know_," the oncologist repeated, a little more forcefully. "I do, Joe. I just…I wanted _this_ guy to survive."

The janitor made a noise of disgust. "You identified with him. Doctor. Medical and mid-life crises coinciding. Married his best friend in some cock-eyed drunken Vegas ceremony. All around nice guy—"

"Jackass best friend," the oncologist corrected, one eyebrow hitched reprovingly. "Yeah, minimise the significance of my dying patient's life – and mine, by the way. Thanks for that."

"He's nothing like you!" the janitor snapped. "_You_ were an idiot before you became a moron. Just because you didn't wind up being a boring cancer statistic, not everyone starts out by surrendering to the here-comes-the-corpse mentality. This guy got himself treated, after a few months of woe-is-meing. He didn't _just_ ride off into the sunset to meet his non-existent maker!"

The oncologist rolled his eyes at the familiar rant.

"Turns out," he countered smugly, "I wasn't so much of an idiot." Their gazes met again as he replaced his glasses and he allowed more softly, "Thanks to you."

The janitor's eyes dashed away from his, jaw stiffening and the oncologist bit back another sigh. Not for the first time, he wished it were possible that he could have put the janitor's name on the clinical trial paperwork too, instead of simply his own and those of the two medical fellows he had roped in.

"Yeah, yeah," the janitor scoffed, after a heartbeat's uncomfortable pause. He straightened up and a wicked glint returned to his eyes. "You know what really says 'thank you for saving my life'? Cleaning up your own damn mess!"

The oncologist caught the mop as it scudded across the wet floor towards him. He chuckled, inclining his head in concession. The janitor popped a strip of gum into his mouth and strolled off, loudly blowing and popping bubbles as he went.

TBC...


End file.
